One of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is to Begin with the End in Mind.

This infographic does just that – recognizing that you need to establish your goals first when looking to your social media marketing strategy.

It doesn’t simply speak about conversions – it speaks to the other business uses of social media: Brand Marketing, Thought Leaderhsip, Service and Sales Prospecting. Much of the strength of social media doesn’t come from the immediate push… it’s the echos and volume that are established over time.

Quick guide to how to do the social media marketing. The companies all over the world are following this guide and they have been successful. I think this is a great article to describe how we use social media as our business tool.

Turnitin, the global leader in originality checking and online grading, today announced a website evaluation rubric to teach students how to analyze and grade the academic quality of the Internet sources used in their writing.

In our 2012 Most Anticipated Book Adaptations article, we picked The Great Gatsby for the #4 slot. Since the writing of that article, the calendar has changed to 2013 and The Great Gatsby still hasn’t come out. And even though it’s supposed to release in May of this year, we’re going to give its spot this year to a new movie, because we don’t do repeats at PWxyz. It’s just a rule, plus we needed to make room for all of the YAey adaptations this year, because you can never have too much teens-in-peril with supernatural garnish. So here are the 10 movies from books we hope are at least somewhat sort of partially worth the hype.

This piece from Trendwatching contains some very valuable information about the future of business and how you can stay relevant by staying informed.

Here are some of the highlights that caught my attention:

Mega-trend of transparency in 2013?

**Brands must move from 'having nothing to hide' to pro-actively showing and proving they have nothing to hide.

**The perfect storm of consumers' ever-greater lust for NEWISM and niches, the expectation of (instantly!) getting jut the right product, ongoing eco-concerns and the desire for more interesting stories will all combine with the spread of new local manufacturing technologiessuch as:

*3D-printing and make-on-demand, to trigger a resurgence in

domestic manufacturing in established markets in 2013

Mobile Moments

**in 2013, consumers will look to their mobile devices to maximize absolutely every moment, multi-if-not-hypertasking their experiences, purchases and communications...

Eco Trend for 2013

**Rather than being discarded or even recycled (by someone else), these products can be given back to nature to grow something new, with all the eco-status and eco-stories

One of the most pressing questions whether you're new to social media or a social media maven is: What's the best way to post information or share content to optimize your reach

Compendium, a content marketing firm conducted a study of more than 200 companies to determine how social media professionals may optimize their engagement with both business-to-business-to-consumer conversations.

What they found is consistent with what Ted Nguyen has experienced and he has demonstrated that he clearly knows what he's doing

Here are some highlights:

"My experience in sharing more than 21,000 tweets and Facebook posts to my more than 82,000 Twitter followers and Facebook friends is consistent with the study’s findings"

.

**I recommend the hours between 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Pacific Time) or 1 to 4 p.m. (Eastern Time) are the best times for Twitter and Facebook to optimize social engagement engagement.

**I find that tweets shared earlier in the week do better than those sent later in the week. I also have discovered that Facebook posts do best Wednesday early afternoon.

**if you look at Ted's social shares, they run around the clock. he tries his best to engage with people in real time or near real time.

Selected by Jan Gordon covering: "Curation, Social Business and Beyond"

After seven years of litigation, Google and book publishers reached a settlement that would allow the publishers to choose whether Google digitizes their books and journals, and to share revenue if the works are purchased through Google's online...

This is an interesting idea to use in the classroom. It would motivate students to improve their skills to achieve these badges. I would suggest implementing these with some incentive system so that students pursue these badges instead of earning them passively as useless labels. These badges can be useful to track progress of historical thinking skills.

Also, download their Twitter guide for small businesses, the link's on the top right hand side of the page. The guide comes from Twitter and is very helpful if you want to use Twitter to spread the word on your business.

Solomon, a librarian with extensive experience in web development, design, and technology, cuts to the chase with this invaluable guide to using social media in any kind of library. With a straightforward and pragmatic ...

" ‘Curation’ is such an overused word in the digital content space these days, it has lost almost any real meaning.

Digital media startups seek to steer consumers away from automation, and back into the human, hand-picked realm.

With that in mind, Paragraph Shorts is the latest ‘curated’ iPad magazine to hit Apple’s Newsstand, serving up a selection of hand-picked short stories in text, audio and video.

Each week, the guys at Paragraph Shorts select seven stories from the likes of The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Moth, The Guardian and others, and present them in a beautiful magazine for the public’s consumption.

It’s not all about text either – the selections may also contain videos of short story-readings, or audio alternatives too. Little icons at the bottom-right of main thumbnail indicate what the content is. And when you launch it, you can have a choice of whether to read it, or listen to a narration.

You can easily alter the font, text size and such like via the settings menu at the top-right, and you can favorite articles or share them across the social sphere too..."

Paragraph Shorts brings you the world's best short stories in text, audio and video. Each issue features some of the most captivating storytellers from the most interesting literary publications, coupled with moving imagery from amazing photographers and artists.

Hybrid Pedagogy is an academic and networked journal of teaching and technology that combines the strands of critical and digital pedagogy to arrive at the best social and civil uses of technology and digital media in education.

Robin Good: Expressedly designed for journalists and newsrooms Spundge is a unique social news discovery, curation and syndication platform that facilitates the discovery, selection and distribution of news content across multiple channels.

Spundge works with topic-specific containers called "notebooks", which you can create and configure to work around any specific topic, event, company or issue you are interested in following.

Spundge taps into YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Soundcloud and Facebook to gather relevant content around your specified topics, as well as into RSS feeds and OPML files that you specify. All these can then be easily filtered (by keyword, time, location, and language) and curated manually before being published inside any topic-specific "notebook".

Notebooks can be made public or private and their contents can be shared on all major social media networks as well as being syndicated outside of Splundge in a number of different ways.

The PRO version of Spundge adds a number of useful features to the free base version, including:

Here's something straight out of science fiction: the University of Iowa is offering a new service to help students overcome test anxiety, using a mind-reading technology that guides them into a state of relaxation.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.